with a twist my mind has missed
by amy like the pond
Summary: Abed is watching Inspector Spacetime when Britta tiptoes out of Troy's bedroom wearing an Inspector Spacetime t-shirt. One-shot.


**with a twist my mind has missed**

Abed is watching Inspector Spacetime when Britta tiptoes out of Troy's bedroom wearing an Inspector Spacetime t-shirt.

He appreciates the coincidence, but also doesn't. Britta's only Inspector Spacetime shirt has Minerva printed on it... No, this one is a men's size, and it's hanging pretty loosely around her small frame. This is when he notes that she isn't wearing any pants.

"Oh, hey Abed!" she whispers fondly, closing the bedroom door behind her. Abed fixates his gaze back onto her chest, and then onto her face.

That's _his_ shirt.

"I didn't think you would still be awake," she confides, looking slightly embarrassed. She's probably noticed she's not wearing any pants, too. "I'm just getting a glass of water."

Abed knows that his eyes are wide, and he wants to say something, because this is making him incredibly uncomfortable. Britta keeps on telling him to let out what makes him uncomfortable, with hopes of them one day getting down to at least one of the roots of at least one of his issues.

But instead he stays silent, and watches her as she walks over to the kitchen area.

"You watching something?" she asks and Abed immediately looks away and back at the TV. Then he realizes she actually _meant_ the TV, and that her back is turned to him, and that she's reaching up on the counter to get a glass out of the cabinet, and her shirt is riding up...

He looks back at the TV moments before she turns around, glass in hand, waiting for an answer.

"Yeah. Inspector Spacetime," he answers, pointing at her without thinking. She looks down, and laughs in an un-Britta-like manner. The sex must have been good.

"Oh, yeah," she grins at him, and he turns away. "I put on Troy's shirt."

_It's mine,_ he almost says. But he doesn't. And he's not totally sure why.

The Inspector is tragically separated from his Constable as Britta fills up her glass at the sink.

"_I'll come for you,"_ he yells through all seventeen dimensions. Ah, the homoerotic subtext. The blogs would have a field-day.

But Abed is hyper-aware of Britta for some reason, and he doesn't want to shut her out. She across the floor, smiles at him, and sits down in the other arm chair.

Abed tries to concentrate on the screen, but Britta's eyes are boring into him. She keeps on looking from the screen to him and back, and he can tell she's itching to say something.

Sighing, he pauses the DVR and faces her.

"What do you want?" he asks bluntly. She sips on her water before answering.

"I just wanted to say thanks, I guess. You're being really great about this whole me-and-Troy thing. Especially now that we're..."

"Having sex."

Britta shrugs but a dazed smile crosses her face.

"Yeah."

Thanks to the silence, Abed's eyes fall back upon her chest.

That's _totally_ his shirt.

Annie must have mixed it up when she did the laundry, which was pretty careless for Annie, but he'd let it slip. Under normal circumstances.

He'd swapped clothes with Troy before, and Jeff... but he wasn't enjoying seeing Britta in his shirt at all. Nope, not at all. Nope. No. Not cool.

Because:

1. She thought it was Troy's.

2. She wasn't wearing a bra.

3. A strand of her hair had fallen on the right sleeve.

4. The front of it was stuck in her panties.

And he knows he wasn't being weird, this was a perfectly uncomfortable situation and he has the right to feel uncomfortable. And annoyed at Annie. And unable to say that it's his.

"Abed," Britta says, a frown creeping upon her features. Abed looks back up at her face, but never into her eyes.

"Sorry," he says, his eyes darting about her features. "_Inspector Spacetime_," he says weakly. He's really tired.

And Britta's content again.

"It is a cool shirt," she muses, looking down.

_My shirt_.

"And it smells pretty good, too."

That does it.

Abed stiffens and purses his lips. He looks away and then back at her. Britta doesn't seem to notice his change in character, but he has moved past uncomfortable now. He's kind of freaking out, and he doesn't know why. His fingers start tapping madly on his knee.

(Does it smell of him, or of Ultra Downy Mountain Spring Liquid with SilkTouch? Or both?)

_Say something normal._

"Annie cleans our clothes."

"I clean my stuff once a week," Britta scoffs, and then looks up. "Abed, are you OK?"

Abed twitches a little, and forces himself to calm down. He thinks about going to his happy place, but fixes his eyes on the frozen Inspector on the screen and breathes.

"... This is about the shirt, isn't it? I couldn't find mine, Troy's was over the chair."

He had probably been planning to give it back.

Abed clears his throat, studying every inch of the paused scene in front of him. Oh, look, a boom mic. He, Troy and Annie had a game where they found boom mics or the camera's reflection in shots and wrote it down in the notebook by the TV. Abed was frozen.

"No, that's fine, I'm fine," he says, surprised that it comes out. "It's just- you know, it took me a little while to adjust at first. You were supposed to end up with Jeff. I guess there's still time for that. But- yeah. It's not- it's not specific to you and Troy. I had pre-planned the group's dinamic and you both... you and Jeff both ignored it completely."

"Well, Abed, that's hardly fair. We've talked about being controlling-"

"I know," Abed cuts her off.

He hears a bizzarely Annie-like gasp and presses play on the DVR.

"Abed, you're being rude."

"I know."

She's hurt, but he kind of wants her to go away. He really wants her to go away.

And she does. She stands up and walks in front of the screen, lingering for a second. His eye twitches, and she carries on walking over to the kitchen. She drains her glass and puts it carefully in the sink.

He sighs deeply and presses pause again.

"I'm sorry I was rude."

He looks over at her, and she's smiling. She's standing right under the kitchen light, her hair is kind of lit up so she kind of has a halo, and he needs to remember that for his filmography class because it's subtle and effective. He's not sure what it's effective for, or what it's affecting.

He does like Britta, he really does. He's upset that she's not as much of a main character that she used to be. He's upset that she didn't get the guy she was supposed to, he's upset that Troy likes her for all the wrong reasons.

All the right reasons would be her hair, and how much she cares; her eyes are a plus, and her goofy smile is kind of adorable. But she's also pretty smart, even if she says stupid things sometimes. She's really nice- she's always been nice to him, even if it was sometimes out of pity he wishes she doesn't have for him. She cares about her friends, she's strong because he knows she's running from some kind of past she never talks about. She's an enigma, a wildcard, and pretty cool.

Something else that's pretty cool is his shirt on her- and as soon as that thought comes up on his list he does a double take. His eyes widen and he suddenly feels much better. He turns off the TV screen and stands up, brushing stray bits of popcorn off of his skinny jeans.

"Another one of the reasons I don't like you and Jeff breaking tradition is because it's yet _another_ reminder that life _isn't_ TV, and there is no logic behind it, and pretty much anything could happen. Like fanfiction."

Britta squints from two meters away, not quite understanding. "Flanfiction?"

Abed shrugs it off- he doesn't want to get into that right now.

He walks over to the blanket fort and says the line that will probably make things clearer, before pulling aside the door and entering, leaving the leading lady standing alone in the kitchen wearing a questionable amount of clothing.

"That's my shirt."


End file.
